Azure PowerShell 1.0 Preview

We are pleased to introduce Azure PowerShell 1.0 Preview, now available on PowerShell Gallery and will be available on WebPI in upcoming weeks. There are many changes in this preview and we’d like to use it to gather feedback, which we’ll incorporate into Azure PowerShell 1.0.

Note: This is a preview and not intended for mission critical applications. If you are running such applications, please continue to use Azure PowerShell 0.9.8. If you would like to use 1.0 Preview, you can uninstall at any point and go back to 0.9.8 (see uninstall section below).

The Azure PowerShell team is laying the foundation for the future of Azure PowerShell with the release of 1.0 Preview. The goals of Azure PowerShell 1.0 are the following:

Enable better support for Resource Manager in Azure Automation

Separate Azure Service Management and Resource Manager functionality to provide clarity regarding features of Azure the cmdlets target

Enforce semantic versioning and ensure cmdlets authored against a given major version of Azure PowerShell will not encounter breaking changes from updates to Azure PowerShell

Distribute Azure PowerShell through WebPI and PowerShell Gallery to enable quicker delivery of new features and defect resolutions

Automation of Azure PowerShell MSDN reference documentation

Note: This is a breaking change for customers using the Azure Resource Manager cmdlets since these cmdlets now get prefixed with AzureRM. To ease the transition, customers can uninstall 1.0 Preview and reinstall 0.9.8 (see uninstall section below).

Getting started is easy!

For a more in depth explanation of install, usage and uninstall continue with the rest of the post.

Installing and importing Azure PowerShell 1.0 Preview

To install Azure PowerShell 1.0 Preview with PowerShellGet, run the following commands:

Now that Azure PowerShell 1.0 preview has been installed, you can import the Azure and AzureRM modules. Azure Resource Manager is split into component modules. For example, Azure Resource Management modules for compute services are in module AzureRM.Compute.

Now that the modules have been imported into the current PowerShell session, Azure PowerShell cmdlets are loaded.

Getting started with Resource Manager

All of the Azure Resource Manager cmdlets follow the [Verb]-AzureRm[Noun] pattern to provide clear indication they work with Azure Resource Manager rather than Azure Service Management.

Getting started with Service Management

Service management should encounter no breaking changes as a result of the separation of Azure Service Management and Azure Resource Manager in Azure PowerShell 1.0 preview. To illustrate this, the commands below should look very familiar.

Uninstalling

Changes to Azure Resource Manager Cmdlets

There are some major improvements and changes to the management cmdlets in Azure Resource Manager. You can view all the changes here.

Again, Getting started is easy!

What's Coming Next?

The process of building Azure PowerShell 1.0 preview was greatly influenced by our community of MVPs, open source contributors and customers. We believe this influence and public discussion led us to a better solution, not just for the team building Azure PowerShell, but for all of the people that use Azure PowerShell. Thank you to everyone that contributed to making 1.0 preview. Let’s keep the feedback coming via GitHub and create an even better Azure PowerShell 1.0.

Expect to see an MSI and a WebPI installer in the upcoming weeks or days. We'll also be adding some more blog posts to explaining some of the design decision, the great open source story of the deprecation of Switch-AzureMode, and more about how to leverage Azure PowerShell 1.0.